skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you. The video would not play for me in the browser.
"Nuclear patent winter is coming" -- House Stallman words
Since he offers $5000 but you only need to pay $100 to participate it is quite easy to win money with the challenge. Ask for a file of 2 bits in length. If it is "11" then compress it to "1". Otherwise compress it to "0X" where X is the contents of the file. Now you have a 1 in 4 chance of winning the challenge. Since you pay $100 but win $5000, this earns good money. Plus it would be hard to argue that this is cheating.

The problem is that you need to supply the decompressor as well. It would depend on how exactly he wants the decompressor be encoded, but the same strategy may still apply with modifications (although it would not work if the required encoding is as a bash script, since lg(100/5000) gives you just 2 bits to play with). [Or you could ask him to modify the challenge such that you are allowed to send him an encrypted decompressor before he sends you the data, and doesn't count towards the total file size (encrypted because otherwise he'll see your strategy and send you a file that it doesn't work on)]

tl;dr: although you can't compress random with probability > 1/2, you can compress random data with probability > 100/5000.
There are bad coders in ever language/platform....and coupled with that, we all have days when we write bad code. The size of the community has very little to do with it I think.
Tent Basics
I'd say it may be less about addiction and more about escapism. The problem being that unlike other video games/books/etc, the story doesn't end, but keeps on going. This allows the escapist to allow themselves to be engulfed by the world.
Entrepreneurship growth: perception vs reality
Game design can quite trivially trigger obsessive and compulsive responses and progressively increase time/money commitment to the next 'hit'. (see: Zynga)

Before Zynga and before free to play games were popular, MMO's like WoW were the default case study for arguments about where the line is, between a pass-time and a conditioning chamber.
I commented on the post, but I wanted to add that bootstrap has a larger ecosystem. I think that is really what will carry it forward. My company makes tools for bootstrap (specifically Jetstrap), and I'm confident the ecosystem will solve some of the dangling problems like helping more people customize the default theme.
Ebook shared pricing experiment
thanks, I didn't want to say it myself :)
Will $framework be the new $language?
Fairly apple and pears comparison and somewhat pointless.
Unofficial Open webOS liveCD/USB
"Oh so you believe in automatic garbage collection? You despicable, good for nothing 47%er! Take out your own garbage by hand!"
How A Google Engineer Built A Universe In An Easter Egg
Proof that fearsome T-Rex evolved into a chicken
[Audio]Steve Jobs 1983 at IDC predicting future
4629 (tweets per second) * 86400 (seconds per day) = 399,945,600 (400 million tweets per day)

So that checks out... I'm guessing the number of new rows per day is excluding tweets.
Signing forms at the top can reduce dishonesty
"Yahtzee" Croshaw says he's working on a horror game for tablets
Favorite "Pricing Page" - You want Parsely? You better pay sucka
One of many examples of why Windows's arbitrary path length restriction is ridiculous.
How did this get voted so high?
Some of their source-links have no connection to the topic, and some of their facts seem wrong. Also, their site does not work very well, since some bubbles do not close when clicked on.
The idea of manipulation in games is when they add specifically add game elements meant to keep the user in the game, and encourage them never to leave. Sure it's all a matter of self-control. Not losing your life-savings at a casino is also about self-control. That doesn't mean that casinos can't do ethically dubious things to take advantage of people without self-control.

E.g. The inside of a casino always looks the same, even at night. No windows (being near the entrance is the exception), lots of bright lights. It makes it easier for a gambler to lose track of time.
this is just pure childish behaviour. this "honest" version is not "honest"
Are you talking about the ones right near the arrow keys? I loved those! Unfortunately (or fortunately for you!) they seem to be gone on the newest T series, replaced by PgUp and PgDn.
Origami (YC S11) is hiring a Product Designer
Families need a place to share and archive memories for potentially hundreds of years. They require something more permanent and we believe we have the solution. We are building a product for the long term so we can't cut any corners. Origami’s team is made of incredible engineers and amazing designers, the same team that built Everyme.

We value design incredibly highly at Origami. Design is how we communicate our ideas and our value to our users, and we strive to exceed their expectations. We are searching for a world-class product designer to come and work with to help us achieve our mission of being the online home for families. Everyone at Origami values the process of design, so you will be free to explore and be creative.

We are located in beautiful downtown Mountain View, CA, a 5-minute walk from the Caltrain station. Lunches are paid for and dinners too if you're here late. We subsidize your health and gym costs. Our office has fully-stocked fridges, a snack bar, and a ping-pong table (of course). You can choose your own workstation and we'll get you any tools you need to do your job better.

We do weekly standups and one-on-ones but spend most of our time working instead of holed up in meetings. We take frequent outings to go-karting, golf, soccer and poker, amongst other activities. We have Learn Something New Mondays, where a team member teaches everyone a subject that they are an expert on

Interested? Get in touch at oliver@origami.com.
Twitter, Paypal join Facebook in showing MySQL performance
Creating a jQuery plugin
>> Supposing I had just finished a Ph.D thesis, that would probably be the first thing to come to mind. The problem, though, is that it would take far longer than 5 minutes to explain.

Of course it would take more than 5 minutes to explain fully. Part of what this question is designed to test is whether you can give a 5-minute version of something more complicated.

If you can't do that, how are you going to, for example, explain why you want to use technology X instead of Y? Assuming the listener knows less about X and Y than you do (whether they're a manager or a fellow programmer), you have to be able to summarize the differences.

This is really an important communication skill.
Then again, it might not. In any case, I'm polishing up my Galilieoscope and hoping for the best. ("The best" meaning that I don't actually need my Galileoscope, because I find it particularly difficult to aim and focus.)
More Certainty On Uncertainty's Quantum Mechanical Role
I've gone to work after staying up all night before, and produced code that looked unfamiliar to me the next day. Some of it had stupid mistakes, but on the other hand, some of it was "I wrote that?" in a good way.

Granted, I'm not writing CompSci research papers on what I do at work, so the difficulty level might have something to do with it.
Giving Our Clients The Best Deal In Mobile
Farnell can now ship them pretty much anywhere with a couple of weeks lead time, which isn't great but is at least an improvement on a couple of months ago.

http://export.farnell.com/rp/order/?COM=raspberrypi-group
Kickstarter received Venture funding from USV (Fred Wilson et al). Since Non-profits don't generally have shareholders I would assume this means that Kickstarter is a For-profit corporation.

http://content.usv.com/pages/kickstarter
You are making yourself sound like a Rails fanboy with little to no real knowledge of PHP.
Very awesome!

It would be great if at some point you wrote up a quick overview of how someone who isn't super familiar with NES emulators could start going through your code to explore/learn!

What parts of this project were made easier/harder by choosing to do it in Go?
OS X comes with Ruby and Python preinstalled as well.
Delightful. I made this!

http://www.neuroproductions.be/logic-lab/index.php?id=9342
This would be very cool if it happened. I still remember spending all of my childhood after learning to read waiting for Comet Halley to return, and then having difficulty seeing it even in the desert of Arizona. Now I refer to that comet as "Halley's Smudge." Comet Hale-Bopp was all right, and well visible from Boston Common on a fine spring evening in 1997 when I was there on a business trip. Simply put, predicting the visibility of a comet to the naked eye is more wild guess than science, but when a comet is visible, it is a delight to the eye.

AFTER EDIT, EXPLANATION OF ASTRONOMICAL MAGNITUDE SCALE:

http://outreach.atnf.csiro.au/education/senior/astrophysics/...

http://www.icq.eps.harvard.edu/MagScale.html

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/stars/magnitudes.htm...

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/howto/basics/Stellar_Magnitud...

Oddly, the historically developed magnitude scale (which goes back to the ancient Greek astronomers) has the brightest objects ranked with magnitudes that are negative numbers, and dimmer objects ranked with increasing numbers that eventually become positive numbers. Of course the estimate of eventual brightness of the newly discovered comet is just that, an estimate, and may disappoint.
Another creation by Colin Furze here: the flame throwing scooter, which incidentally got him arrested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UNr1XClnec

I wish I had the time to do pointless and dangerous things like this.
It isn't his business accumen or presentation skills that people miss. It is his ability to inspire people to do better. His passion for doing something amazing.

In many ways John Lennon was the same. Read a biography of him and listen to outtakes from Beatles recordings to see what I mean.

Imagine if we all had that kind of passion and devotion to being and creating the best. Imagine if we all created such amazing things that Steve Jobs and John Lennon looked... normal.
When I don't write things down in a TO-DO list, I always feel like I have a cloud over my head, ready to explode into a hurricane. There is this pressure and constant iteration going on: "you've got to do X", "you've go to do Y", "you've to do Z, but you haven't even started Z", and can get overwhelming at times. When you have at least 1 meeting per day at work with different teams, when you've got school and associated deadlines, when you've got a significant other, etc, you WILL BE overwhelmed with all of the things you need to do.

At some point, the brain cannot hold everything into 1 context and will kill some things - some that may turn out to be important for you in the long run. So I find it very productive to write things down in one or more to-do list, and then switch contexts when the time comes. This allows me to concentrate on 1 thing at a time, knowing that I can later focus on all the other things I need to do, without dropping the ball on any of those, because I happened to forget about thing X or Y.

Nowadays, the only difficulty I face is performing the actual context switch. For example, after working 8 hours in Node.js with vows, bootstrap, jqmobile, mongodb,etc, it is painful to switch to working on a POSIX-compliant memory manager in C99 and then switch into family-mode or friendly-guy mode and entertain family/friends/etc. I found that performing some completely unrelated activity (like playing basketball) helps ease the transition from one context to the other, but I don't always have a 2 hour window for a context switch.

Anyways, I use trello these days.

TL;DR: bullshit, TO-DO lists are very helpful and I am the living proof.
The 5% is separate from the payement fees, so the total is around 8%.

"Kickstarter collects a 5% fee from the project’s funding total if and only if a project is successfully funded. Amazon (our payments processor) also charges credit card processing fees that generally work out to 3-5%. "
From Data to Insight (slides)
American voters would rather elect a gay or Muslim president than an atheist. Here is a 2012 Gallup poll:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/155285/Atheists-Muslims-Bias-Pres...
I'm glad you appended "when considering only its bug detecting capabilities". Something like SQLite, whose functionality is largely static, definitely benefits from the additional test coverage, but the majority of code out there--code that's constantly evolving, code to which functionality is frequently added and removed--is too often prematurely cast in stone by overzealous testers, making maintenance and evolution significantly more difficult than it ought to be. In a lot of cases, too much test coverage actually reduces the value of the code.
I'm still using my X31. With Arch Linux it's still as fast as I need it to be.

Simply the best machines.
Bootstrap's fluid grid implementation is weak and fails when you want to use their responsive styles. For some reason they decided it'd be a good idea to change fluid column widths based on media types, including screens >1200px. This means you end up with oddly resizing columns, especially on desktops. This is completely pointless for fluid grids since you should be modifying the container size and not the column size. It seems like they implemented fluid columns as if they're fixed width.
I think this is the first time Apple posted a non QuickTime video on their site. As a Linux user, it felt different :)
libc (both GNU and BSD)
I can't fathom how someone could have a difficult time understanding how to use iDrive. I've found it simple to use since day one.
Hmmm, despite what uni authorities said, there is no recording of that particular talk available. So I have no specific advice, apart from bland "search YouTube" or "ask by email".
"The Grugq: I’m not joking. You don’t even need to do that. You just send an e-mail which says, you can literally just say, "Run this code." Some of the anti-phishing guys I’ve worked with are just shocked at what happens. I had some friends who worked in corporate security who had to do a cleanup after they got hit with e-mails which said literally, "click on this" and they had 10 or 20 people who did. It was less than 1 percent, but it was enough. People will do it and even on a locked-down corporate PC, it doesn’t matter. If you can get an HTTP connection back out to the Web, you can then tunnel in over that."

(The Grugq sells high value 0days and is a respected member of the hacking community)
http://www.csoonline.com/article/216370/where-is-hacking-now...
I'm in a similar position. I have a T60 right now, and I have been considering upgrading to a T430, but I really don't have a huge need to. My laptop runs fast enough for the stuff I use it for, and it's still in good condition (but I'd still love to get a new, faster computer).

I've been using the laptop practically every day for the past 4 years, carrying it to campus, etc, and it's been holding up quite well. The only downside is that they don't offer very good graphics cards for it, so it wouldn't make a good gaming computer. It does have a really nice keyboard thought, and makes a great development PC.
What I'm more interested in is how SQLite reached such substantial test coverage. What techniques or tools were used to generate the tests? Did someone (drh?) actually sit down, read through the code, and construct a test case for every branch, or did they use tools to facilitate test case construction? How can I apply the same effort to my own software (once it's ready) to improve its reliability?
A funny thing here... If you count the number of active copies, this may not be true. Usually you don't see ten apps in one system coming with their own version of libc. This may pretty well be true for sqlite.
We're quickly approaching that insane point in this discussion where we're now forensically dissecting what appears, to me at least, to be a throwaway comment by zalew. If zalew meant the comment to be a deep critique about the intersection between age and vocal fan boy-ism then I've missed that.

I don't see the comment as ageism. I see the comment as constructing a strawman in order to point out that the more vocal proponents a new technology has, the more attention and interest it can draw on a site like hackernews. It's a subset of the problem that on the internet, in front of an anonymous audience, points of view (or arguments) that are forcefully presented and appear to be logically consistent can often beat out points of view (or arguments) that are less well reasoned and less forcefully presented, even if they are more factually correct.

Thus 'python is dying' becomes a thing because it doesn't have the same level of noise surrounding it as other technologies. The lack of noise doesn't mean python is dying, it means python is less noisy (whatever that actually means).

But to get back to the point I was trying to make. The comment doesn't really say anything about being 19. Sure attach an 'immature' or a 'lacks experience' and now we're trending towards stereotypes that could imply ageism. Same as if zalew had said "a 56 year old condescending, out of touch, past their prime, vocal grandfather of two, great grandfather of 6, fan boy."

But simply sticking 19 next to some other words doesn't automatically imply ageism. And anyway I was reacting to ElliotH's need to defend himself from the characterization made in the strawman argument. If you want to go around fighting all things ageism that's your right and you're welcome to do it. But to spend time fighting strawmen, well, that seems a bit ridiculous. Although, at this point no more ridiculous than the amount of time and effort I've put into this reply. So I guess we're all suffering from the same thing this morning. Must be something in the company coffee.
Thank you for the explanation.

I do a very limited version of this simply by eyeballing the certificate chain when connecting to the limited set of sites where I really care about security.

I've long wondered at the dearth of client side tracking tools/functionality for this. Then again...

I'm glad it's being addressed in a fashion to and by people who have a chance of making it stick.
Motorola wins German patent case against Microsoft
Well, I told the author of SQLite that a double inner join took forever to complete. He just told me I was wrong, but this inner join worked fine on PostGres, MySql and so on.

It annoys me, because neither PostGres not MySql are a binary file you can just run with a query, unlike SQLite which is very convenient for embedding in a desktop app.
I think I just found an easter egg in Siri in tribute to Steve: http://i.imgur.com/Ptz47.png
Does the name start with New and end with Relic, by chance? :) I'd love to compare notes sometime. My email's in my profile.
Forget your MVP, build a MCP.
Casa da Ópera em Oslo - Noruega
Well, I have to commend you on your entrepreneurial spirit to keep trying. If you keep trying you're bound to hit it eventually (if you haven't already).
a lot of people here praise bootstrap for giving more out of the box. frankly I'd rather the framework not decide for me about the look and feel, and IMHO it's easier to customize Zurb Foundation which is a bit more modest about the default looks, than get rid of that 'twitterific' crap Bootstrap gives out of the box. and sass > less (yeah I know there are ports). I went with Zurb. too bad these frameworks don't respect semantic html much.
So how can a company get listed here?
the more extreme code talks tend to have really great slides - in this case slides are a better format than a blog post really because you can direct the audience's attention through the important bits of the code with your slide transitions, as opposed to just throwing gists at them. here's an example from a talk i just gave, the slides came out well imo[1], its basically the material's i'd use to teach my colleagues this stuff.

[1] http://www.dustingetz.com/2012/09/24/StrangeLoop2012-monads-...

really i think it comes down to, for a lot of talks, slides aren't value-add to the audience, they're just a loose outline for the speaker
Yesterday: "Apple is a worthless patent troll. All of their 'inventions' are things that were invented somewhere else. The only thing they did was patent other people's work, then charge twice as much for it to a bunch of worthless fan-boys."

Today: "R.I.P. Steve Jobs. He did so much to change the face of technology forever."

`

Sometimes you have to sit back and appreciate the fickleness of a crowd...
Why Incubators Matter, in the Dominant Accelerator Landscape.
And with Chrome on Ubuntu, like them, it worked fine for me.
This is another example of someone who I think looked at my code examples but didn't read the post. Fair enough, I guess.

> While of course it is possible to define abstractions that handle fizzbuzzing anything for any number, it's clear that the monoid way is a bad overweight bloated approach.

Why? It is not computationally expensive, and it avoids excess modulo operations. All the dispatching work gets figured out at compile time and you end up with pretty much the same sorts of string concatenation costs you get in every other implementation.

Do you mean to suggest that it is conceptually expensive?

> Lastly functional and procedural programming enable you to work at the highest level of abstraction you can think of, whereas OO tends to lock you at a specific abstraction level, which is pretty low and not adapted to most cases.

I actually agree with this, although I sort of question procedural's place on the totem. I suppose stuff like Forth suggests you're right.
I've been using IBM (and now Lenovo) Thinkpads for quite some time, and despite being a fan of their X series (currently using an X220) I REALLY wish Lenovo would consolidate lineups and focus on higher quality offerings. Even small stuff like offering a TN panel on an X series instead of an IPS panel seems foolish. Having just upgraded my display from TN to IPS, it's such a stark difference that I think Lenovo should default to selling these kinds of higher-end product lines with IPS.

When IBM solid Thinkpad, it was a premium brand. It still maintains that connotation among IT professionals today (who know the lineups and history), but there are so many models out there that are absolute crap (or at least, look like garbage) that it's diluting the reputation.

This is pure speculation, but I haven't heard "that Thinkpad looks awesome" or "that machine looks well built" in quite some time (X1 carbon aside).
Nutrients for Better Mental Performance (GoogleTechTalk) 2009
argh. you are right - i cannot do simple arithmetic. sorry. [and now it is too late to alter or delete the comment]
I loved the ThinkPads I owned. In the mid to late 90s I was flying a lot around the US and used to carry one of the ThinkPads where you could remove the CD drive after lifting up the keyboard and install a second battery.

That machine also had a removable hard drive that I used to pop out when leaving my computer in hotel rooms so that I didn't mind if the machine was stolen.

On long flights I would carry up to six batteries with me which led to a funny exchange with Nicholas Negroponte who imagined (writing a Wired) a day when batteries had a power meter on them (imagine that!). I wrote to him to say that my solution for long flights was that I numbered my batteries and used them in order. He replied to the effect: "The simple solutions are often the best".

The Wired piece from 1996: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/negroponte.html

Now when I travel, almost everyone is pecking away at a
keyboard. The one-line monochrome message has evolved into
a full-color, 12-inch display. That is enormous progress,
but at a powerful price. I now carry eight to ten battery
packs during long trips. I won't even consider a laptop
design that includes unstackable batteries. The fact that
most batteries don't indicate their charge state is
pathetic. It's as if the designer assumed that the laptop
would always be used plugged in, and that people would
travel with one spare battery at most.